Doom Comes to Sunnyvale: Our 3rd Annual Halloween Zombie Game

The club gathered last week for what has become an annual event: our Halloween zombie apocalypse game! This session continued the narrative that began in our first two games and saw our survivors escape from the chaos and carnage of New Chicago and flee into the relative safety of rural Illinois. Many months passed, and the survivors found comfort and shelter in Sunnyvale, an abandoned trailer park located deep in the woods. As the weeks passed and the zombie threat diminished, the survivors thought they had escaped the worst. They were wrong...

Doom Comes to Sunnyvale was conceived by Josh and I as an all-out assault by the walking dead on the fortified trailer park. The whole scenario was built around a truly epic terrain project from Josh -- he singledhandedly assembled, prepped and painted each and every mobile home in the park, most with special touches and unique features. As if that weren't enough, he made a whole bunch of extra terrain to accompany the trailer park and set the rural scene: a playground, a water tower, a clothesline and a windmill. Combined with a veritable forest of trees from me and Tim and you've got all the makings of an excellent wilderness zombie game -- quite different from our typical urban zombie games.

We had five players for the game: Karl, Tim, Matt, Mattias and Tyler, with some spectating from Mike C. and Mike M. We decided to use Blasters & Bulkheads for the scenario, which is the same ruleset that we used last year. It's easy to pick up and has a great "henchmen" mechanic for running groups of zombies. Josh and I had adapted Tim's house rules to randomly generate hordes of zombies from five spawn points on the tabletop. These were known to the players, and they had the option of fighting their way across the table to a supply shed, grabbing some grenades, and attempting to destroy these spawn points with heavy explosives. As you'll see in the battle report, a couple players tried to go this route, but they quickly found themselves overwhelmed by the endless ranks of the dead.

Speaking of undead, this game featured more zombies than ever before! Between Tim, Josh and I, we had upwards of 75 painted zombies on the table!

Here's the tabletop at the start of the game. Survivors are milling around in the center of the trailer park, mostly unaware of the looming zombie threat.

And we're off! The first turn, Josh and I ended up deploying several dozen zombies among the five spawn points. The walkers immediately shuffled in the general direction of the survivors. We had some rough behavior rules in mind for the zombies. In order of priority, they would:

1. If alone, move to join a group of zombies
2. Move toward and attack the nearest survivor
3. Move forward in a straight line

As you can see in these photos, the zombie hordes grew quickly and moved through the woods into the survivors' settlement.

Each player had two survivor figures armed with a variety of weapons. We played the survivors as WYSIWYG, so if a survivor had a shotgun and a machete, well, that's what he had to fend off the undead hordes.

As the zombies approached the settlement, some players sent their survivors to meet the zeds at the perimeter. A vicious firefight developed on the east flank of the settlement as zombies swarmed out of a traffic pileup and into Sunnyvale proper.

Across the map on the west side of the trailer park, another ragged group of survivors faced off against shamblings hordes spilling out of the dense woodlands.

The players maneuvered and attacked the hordes, slaughtering dozens of the walking dead and littering the streets with rotting corpses. The henchmen rules for Blasters & Bulkheads meant that the zombie groups moved and fought together but died easily to coordinated firepower. Once they got in close combat with the survivors, it became hard to escape!

Just as the survivors were getting a handle on the looming zombie threat, Josh and I played our ace card -- with a clank and a groan, zombies shoved aside manhole covers in the center of the street and started spilling out of underground sewers! The perimeter of Sunnyvale had been breached!

Again the survivors fought with the ferocity of cornered tigers, fending off the undead hordes even as they boiled up from the sewer manholes. But by this point, we were nearing our turn limit, and it was clear that the survivors would be able to escape and live to fight another day. Sunnyvale, however, was completely overrun, as these photos show.

In the end, it was a pyrrhic victory for the survivors. They had managed to escape, but their settlement was a total loss. What had once been a spark of hope in the vast, dim realm of the zombie apocalypse -- Sunnyvale -- was now reduced to a desolate wasteland where the walking dead prowled and no sanctuary could be found.

All in all it was a fun game that built on the narrative established in our first couple zombie games. We're even more excited to play a sequel with the survivors returning, perhaps armed with military-grade equipment, to clean out Sunnyvale and turn it into a proper defensible settlement. This will give us another chance to play on Josh's excellent terrain!

Afterward, we gave out some prizes for most zombies killed, best team player, etc. The goodies were provided by Matt (proprietor of Wreck-Age and all-around great guy). Everyone got to take home a Wreck-Age treat, so look for some new additions to our post-apoc games in the near future.

-- Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member (photos by Josh)